Strava

The Strava Files

Everyone agrees that when Kim Flint crashed, he was chasing a record on Strava, the social fitness site that has rewritten the etiquette of cycling and shattered its traditions, transformed countless lives for the better, and fostered as many friendships (and rivalries). What almost no one seems to fully comprehend is exactly who—or what—caused Flint’s death.

david darlington

Flint, encouraged by and proud of how cycling was reshaping his body and life, was captioned as “Smokin’ Hawt!” in this photo from his Twitter feed.

STRAVA WAS THE brainchild of Michael Horvath and Mark Gainey, who—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—were rowing teammates at Harvard in the late ’80s. Horvath, who spent the first six years of his life in Sweden (“Strava” means “strive” in Swedish), mainly grew up in Hingham, Massachusetts, south of Boston, where he was “the kind of kid who would hang around at the bike shop.” In high school he played soccer and tennis, but he says, “It wasn’t until I got to college and joined the crew team that I realized that I had the capacity for winning anything.”

Rowers, Horvath explains, train all year long for a half-dozen races in the spring. “To stay motivated, it’s really important to have teammates you’re training with day in and day out, who drive you and push you to achieve your peak in performance. That’s almost what being on the crew team is all about, as opposed to ­racing against other crews. And it’s hard to re-create when you leave.”

After college Horvath became a triathlete. He trained alone mostly, working around a growing family and a job teaching economics at Stanford. Meanwhile, his old teammate Gainey was working at a venture-capital company in nearby Silicon Valley, where the World Wide Web was beginning to infiltrate people’s personal lives. “Mark would come to my office and pitch ideas for different start-up companies,” Horvath remembers. Together, the two ex-rowers hatched the notion of creating a kind of online locker room. “What we wanted to do is connect you with other people so you don’t feel so alone, even when you’re training alone,” says Horvath. “If you can see yourself relative to other folks and you know your workout is going to be exposed to them after you’re done, it’s going to motivate you.”

They floated the idea to various website developers, none of whom took them up on it. “In 1996 the technology was very rudimentary—everyone said, ‘No way we can build that for you.’ But some developers suggested another problem to solve: Customers wanted to talk to companies through e-mail, but didn’t have any ­systems to handle that flow of communication.” Horvath and Gainey started Kana Software, the first enterprise e-mail management system, and it went public three years later. After cashing out of Kana, ­Horvath moved to New Hampshire to teach entrepreneurship at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. Gainey stayed in Silicon Valley, where the tools for building an online locker room were rapidly improving.

“In our original conception, Strava was just going to be manually entered workouts,” Horvath says. “GPS wasn’t even part of it—it used to be very expensive to get a Garmin watch to track your workout, and very poor quality. It was really just an approximation of where your location was—you couldn’t even tell, ‘Am I on that street or this street?’ But during the Clinton administration, the government increased the accuracy level for public use of GPS from 50 meters to 3—and the price point had come down into the three-hundred-dollar range.”

Moreover, with the advent of Twitter and Facebook, the practice of sharing information online had gone public in a big way. And social fitness networks such as Garmin Connect and Map My Ride were luring legions of cyclists to upload their distance, speed, elevation gain, heart rate, pedaling cadence, and power output. Clearly, Horvath says, “The time was right to try our idea again.” They focused on cycling (as opposed to running, which they’ve since added) because bike riders were already widely using GPS and power meters. The difference between Strava and its competitors—most of which consisted merely of elaborate storehouses for personal data—was the public comparison of one’s own performance with others.

“It might be people you know, or people you’ve initiated a relationship with and are following,” Horvath says. “If someone is following you, they’ll see the information you’ve uploaded. If you look at my profile, for example, you’ll see yourself compared to me on average rides per week for the last four weeks, total number of miles ridden, and hours on the bike this year. It gives you an ability to see if a person is extremely active, about as active, or less active than you are—if they’re compatible with you if you go for a bike ride.”